A gaming machine includes but is not limited to slot machines of the type manufactured by Aristocrat Technologies or International Gaming Technologies. Many other types of gaming are available in casinos and for the sake of clarity this document describes implementations with slot machine, but it equally applies to other types of gaming devices.
Cell phones have been used as tickets to gaming entry to events, with a bar code being sent to the phone and the bar code being scanned at the event entry point to gain admittance.
The company Veritec has products to allows two-dimensional (2D) bar codes to be transmitted to cell phones and used for coupons, gift certificates, and event tickets.
The Internet search engine GOOGLE® selects placement of advertising to display on web page search results in part according to the amount bid by advertisers, with a higher bid getting a better placement on the web page or pages. See U.S. Pat. No. 7,136,875, entitled “Serving advertisements based on content”.
Multigame gaming machines have more than one game available for play and the player selects a game to play from a menu. With current technology it is possible to place a large number of games on the gaming machine, such that it is difficult for the player to choose a game to play, and in the future this problem will become worse.
For example, the initial game selection may show 10 games that can be selected, while in the future the entire library of games available may be more than 1000.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 20070054738 teaches a multigame gaming system wherein the gaming system prioritizes games for player selection according the players game preferences as determined by their play history and the preferences of other players who liked the same games.
Client Server and downloadable gaming systems allow the selection of games from those available on a server, and potentially include the entire library of games from the manufacturer.
Due to technological limitations, there may be a noticeable delay when the player selects a different game to that already playing as the game needs to be loaded from secondary storage or the across a network into main memory prior to play commencing. Typically, some or all of a game will be run from dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), which is very fast but has limited capacity, and games are loaded into DRAM for execution by the central processing unit (CPU) from Hard disk, CD-ROM, or across a network. For security, the gaming machine may also authenticate the game prior to execution to check it has not been tampered with, and this authentication may also introduce a delay. Both standalone and client server gaming systems can experience such delays. See U.S. Pat. No. 5,643,086.
Gaming regulations in some states require that when a new game is selected from the system for downloaded (rather than being selected by the player), that the gaming machine must have been not been played for some time before a new game may be downloaded.
When no players are playing the gaming machine it goes into an attract mode, where it shows a game or games that are available for play.
Traditional player tracking systems use magnetic cards or smartcards encoded with a unique identification number to identify players to the gaming system when the player inserts the magnetic card into a card reader in a gaming machine. Prior to the card being inserted the system does not know the identity of the player; however once inserted, the system knows with certainty the identity of the card owner, and hence assuming the player is the owner.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,655,961 shows a bonusing system, in which player tracking is provided via a magnetic card carried by a player and which the player inserts into a magnetic card reader in a gaming machine to identify the player to the machine and/or the entire system.
Casinos award complimentary services and/or items (“comps”) to players in order to attract them back the casino in the future. Typically, comps include free meal and/or rooms. The value of comps awarded is usually calculated as a proportion (typically about 30%) of the player's theoretical losses, with the player tracking system being used to track the players betting history and hence determine the theoretical loss.
The company “locate mobiles.com” offers an Internet based cell phone tracking service. Standard cell phones can be located and tracked to an accuracy of up to 50 meters by measuring time delay and signal strength, and hence distance, to multiple cell phone base stations and use triangulation to determine the location. The location is shown on an Internet based map.
Many cell phones and PDAs incorporate BLUETOOTH® radio transceivers, which have a unique MAC address that is remotely detectable. The company Tadlys Wireless Communications sells the Topaz Location System for location tracking Bluetooth tags and BLUETOOTH® enabled devices including cell phones to an accuracy of 2-3 meters.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,035,626, entitled “Remote gaming using cell phones with location and identity restrictions,” discloses a cell phone with location detection used to determine a players jurisdiction and hence ability to gamble.
Automated facial recognition uses computer systems to automatically recognize people from camera or video surveillance. Systems have been installed and tested in a number of cases, including the American Super Bowl XXXV, the London Borough of Newham and Boston's Logan airport.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,142,876, entitled “Player tracking and identification system,” discloses the use of facial recognition in Casino player tracking systems.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,758,751, entitled “Method and apparatus for monitoring casinos and gaming,” discloses facial recognition used to detect undesirable players in a casino game.
Gender may be determined from facial and voice analysis as described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,990,217 and U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 20030110038.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,175,528, entitled “Passive biometric customer identification and tracking system,” discloses the use of biometric identification in a casino.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,288,025, entitled “Apparatus and method for controlling and preventing compulsive gaming,” discloses biometric and facial recognition to prevent gaming by undesirable players.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,902,484, entitled “Game machine and network system for setting up game environment thereof,” discloses setting up a gaming machine from a players account based on their facial identification from a camera on the gaming machine.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,641,484, entitled “Gaming machine including security data collection device,” discloses a gaming machine with camera and microphone.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,612,928, entitled “Player identification using biometric data in a gaming environment,” discloses authenticating a player at a gaming machine.
Automated gait recognition is able to detect gender with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
The company OBJECTVIDEO® sells automated surveillance equipment for gaming applications, including security, counting people in/out of stores, bars, restaurants and on the casino floor, traffic pattern analysis, crowd density monitoring, and/or dwell time indication around specific gaming tables.
Automatic number plate recognition is a well established technology dating back to the 1980's, and can be used to track car movement in real time. Most main roads and motorways in the city of London's congestion charge zone have automatic number plate recognition for the automatic charging of road use.
The company Silicon Gaming release a product in about 2000, that embedded a camera into a gaming machine and displayed the player's image in the game.
From the magazine Strictly Slots Magazine “Family Feud!”, around 2000.
“To the right of the main video screen is a small replica of a television camera. It is a real camera that captures the image of the player and incorporates it into the game screen during the bonus round.”
U.S. Pat. No. 7,048,630, entitled “System for and method of capturing a player's image for incorporation into a game,” discloses a camera in a gaming machine used to capture a player's picture.
Casino's typically present advertising to groups of players using large graphic displays on the ends of banks of gaming machine, and at other locations within the casino.